Technology | The Guardian

Social expectations about digital etiquette have never been more in flux. The solution? Avoid worrying about it altogetherYou know you’ve reached a crisis point in your email backlog when you’re obliged – as I was recently – to confront the following conundrum of electronic etiquette: is it ruder to reply to an email after three months than not to reply at all? On one hand, obviously, not replying is obnoxious. On the other, at least it lets the sender imagine that you missed their message entirely, or even that it never arrived; a reply implies, insultingly, that I had three months’ worth of more important things to do first (and/or that I’m hopelessly overwhelmed by emails – which is true, and particularly embarrassing, given that I’ve championed various systems for taming the monster in this very column).In the end, I opted to reply. But even then I didn’t get closure on the matter, because of course the recipient didn’t say she was offended and, this being email, I had no facial expressions or vocal inflections by which to judge. The internet: helping us understand each other less well since 1969. Continue reading...

Foreign minister suggests recent actions against Chinese firms are ‘deliberate political suppression’China’s foreign minister has said Beijing will “take all necessary measures” to defend the rights and interests of Chinese companies such as Huawei, which is locked in an escalating legal dispute with the US.Beijing’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, said in response to a question about the company suing the US: “It is not difficult to see that the recent actions against specific Chinese enterprises and individuals are not just judicial cases, but deliberate political suppression. Continue reading...

The SpaceX founder and Tesla chief executive smoked marijuana on a comedian’s podcast last September, a US official saidSpaceX chief executive and Tesla boss Elon Musk’s security clearance is being reviewed by the Pentagon after the billionaire smoked marijuana on a California comedian’s podcast last September, a US official said on Thursday.An incident report was started by the Pentagon some time after the marijuana event, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The review was first reported by Bloomberg. Continue reading...

Move comes as social media faces growing scrutiny over its role in promoting anti-vaccine propagandaFacebook will no longer allow advertisements that include misinformation about vaccines as part of an effort to reduce the spread of “vaccine hoaxes” on the platform, the company announced on Thursday.Facebook will also diminish the reach of groups and pages that spread anti-vaccine misinformation by reducing their ranking in search results and on the News Feed, removing them from autofill suggestions in the search bar, and removing them from recommendation features such as “Groups You Should Join”. Continue reading...

More than 100 false accounts posed as far-right and leftwing activists to sow division, says companyFacebook has removed a network of more than 100 accounts and pages for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” on its social networks – the first time it has done so for UK-based operations seeking to influence British citizens.The operation was spread over Facebook and Instagram and used a network of fake accounts to pose as both far-right activists and their opponents. It ran pages and groups whose names frequently changed in order to drum up more followers and operated fake accounts to engage in hate speech and spread divisive comments on both sides of UK political debate, Facebook says. Continue reading...

The Facebook founder talks about his firm’s new focus, but what does it all mean?My focus for the last couple of years has been understanding and addressing the biggest challenges facing Facebook. This means taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. In this note, I’ll outline our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform.There are two types of Mark Zuckerberg post, the short feature-packed ones and the long thinky ones. This is the latter, focused on “vision and principles”. Continue reading...

Eira wants to join because she is missing out on things, but doesn’t want to build a profileIs it possible to be a passive user of Facebook? I want to read announcements relating to friends and colleagues, and maybe post comments, without building a profile with photos, a timeline and so on. I have managed perfectly well without joining, but occasionally miss useful information that is not available elsewhere. EiraWhat’s known as “lurking” – being a member without actively participating – is very common. To quote Jakob Nielsen, “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” This is known as the 1% rule, and it’s obviously a gross generalisation. Continue reading...

Foreign secretary to call for global action but say there is no proof of interference in UKJeremy Hunt is to promise the government will step up international efforts to prevent overseas cyber-attacks on elections, while insisting the UK has never succumbed to such outside interference.A number of groups have called for an investigation into allegations that Russia was behind interference before the 2016 EU referendum, and for a wider examination of the role of foreign companies in the campaign. Continue reading...

The Facebook CEO says integrating messaging apps will help protect users’ privacy, but experts disagreeFor 15 years, Facebook has pushed, prodded, cajoled, lured and tricked billions of people into sharing the most intimate details of their lives online, all purportedly in service of making the world “more open and connected”.On Wednesday, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg put forward a new idea: doing the opposite. Continue reading...

Mark Geyer goes on attack after false claim about daughter on NRL Memes pageFacebook has defended its “reporting tools” after the former NRL player Mark Geyer took aim at the NRL Memes page, which falsely suggested his daughter had been caught up in the league’s latest sex tapes scandal.Geyer has threatened legal action against the page after it suggested that his daughter, Montanna, was one of two women featured in the Tyrone May sex tapes. Continue reading...

PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4; Capcom

Two anticipated PlayStation games make different post-apocalyptic pitches: hordes of virus-infected undead walking, or romance in a pitiless, violent world. Pick your pandemic …

The prison where sensors and wristbands are saving lives, cutting hospital visits and reducing costsJim Lees woke up late one night needing to use the toilet. As he sat up in bed, he felt dizzy, then blacked out and fell to the floor.He remembers: “Everything went blank. I fell and was unconscious. I don’t know how long I was out.” When Lees [not his real name], 80, did regain consciousness, he couldn’t get back up. “My foot wouldn’t grip the floor. There was blood and urine everywhere. I just don’t know what happened to me.” Continue reading...

Firm’s move comes as Amazon removes one of far-right activist’s books from saleYouTube has defended its decision to keep Tommy Robinson on its platform, arguing that the far-right activist’s content on its site is fundamentally different from the posts that led Facebook and Instagram to delete his account last week.Additionally, Amazon has removed one of Robinson’s books, Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam, from sale. His autobiography remains on the site. The company confirmed its decision to the Guardian, saying that “we reserve the right not to sell certain inappropriate content”. Continue reading...

Machines can now allegedly identify anger, fear, disgust and sadness. ‘Emotion detection’ has grown from a research project to a $20bn industry

Electric cars featured heavily at the 89th annual motoring showcase event in Switzerland, as manufacturers rolled out new electric and hybrid models to address tougher emissions requirements in Europe. SUVs and SUV-like crossovers also had a good showing, in addition to new prestige and performance models and concepts from car makers Continue reading...

The latest internet meme involves a significant waste of cheese – and may not be entirely welcomed by the world’s baby communityName: The cheese challenge.Age: Five days. Continue reading...

Machines can already write music and beat us at games like chess and Go. But the rise of artificial intelligence should inspire hope as well as fear, says Marcus du SautoyAs Marcus du Sautoy greets me at the entrance to New College, Oxford, his appearance is a quiet riot of colour. His clothes rather suggest someone who ran into White Stuff or Fat Face and frantically grabbed anything he could find – in this case, a salmon zip-up top, multihued check trousers and shoes that are a headache-inducing shade of turquoise. When we settle down to talk in a nearby meeting room, he repeatedly glances at a notepad – whose pages, just to add to all the garishness, are a bold shade of yellow.They are full of what look like scrawled equations, mixed with odd-looking shapes: the raw material, he explains, of a project involving very complicated geometry. “There’s an infinite symmetrical structure that I’m looking at,” he says, “and I think the top bit of it will tell me everything that’s going on inside it. It’s almost like an infinite lake, and I should be able to know everything that’s happening in it by looking at the first centimetre.” Continue reading...

Ranking of 230 countries placed UK 136th, with India as cheapest countryThe UK is one of the priciest countries in Europe for mobile phone data, with Britons typically paying almost six times more than their counterparts in Finland, according to a new study.Some may also be surprised to see that the top 10 cheapest countries in the world include the likes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Sudan. Continue reading...

Amnesty says social media firm must do more to support users who report harassmentHuman rights campaigners have called for action after a survey revealed that more than half of the reports that women lodge about harassment on Facebook are met with no action from the social media company.The Survation poll, commissioned by the feminist campaign group Level Up, found that 29% of the 1,000 women who took part had been harassed on Facebook. Continue reading...

Retailer also introduces serial numbers and automatic detection to curb frauds salesAmazon will hand over unprecedented powers to brands to remove suspected counterfeits from its site, as part of a concerted push to eliminate fakes and frauds from the shopping experience.Under the company’s new Project Zero programme, companies will now be able to remove counterfeit listings themselves, without having to wait for Amazon to take action. Continue reading...

Contact details supplied by users to enable two-factor authentication led to reduced privacyFacebook has been accused of abusing a security feature in order to weaken user privacy, after the social network was found using phone numbers initially handed over for account safety for other purposes.The company now faces criticism that it will be harder to convince users to take other necessary security measures if users view this as an abuse of trust. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo

Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Home and other AI devices tend to be voiced by women, playing into the stereotype that serving is a woman’s job. But do robots need to be gendered at all?Microsoft has Cortana, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has … well, Google Assistant. That last name doesn’t give it away, but get it talking and the common link between all three AI assistants is revealed: they are all supposed to be women.Providing assistance has long been considered a woman’s role, whether virtual or physical, fictional or real. The robots that men voice, meanwhile, tend to be in positions of power – often dangerously so. Think Hal 9000, or the Terminator: when a robot needs to be scary, it sounds like a man. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber talks to Douglas Rushkoff about his new book, Team Human, a call to arms for people to start working togetherJordan is joined by Douglas Rushkoff, the author and professor of media theory at Queens College, City University of New York. With his new book, Team Human, he hopes to explain how tools meant to improve human connection, such as the internet, have ended up being used against us, and why people have to relearn how to work together to fight back. Continue reading...

From a ‘battle royale’ showdown to a shoot ’em up revival, three mixed new titles demonstrate the value to games of genresGenres, as the graphic novelist Alan Moore once wrote, are pretty much only useful for directing the WH Smith’s clerk in which section to place the books. The best work is woven from threads of comedy, tragedy, romance, horror and all the rest. It defies, in other words, tedious categorisation. In video games, however, the strictures of genre cannot be so easily dismissed. Game design is tactile, quasi-architectural in nature. Games are more easily grouped, then, and drift in and out of fashion more readily than film and literature, as a trio of this month’s releases demonstrate.The Ukrainian fingerprints of Metro Exodus’s development team are pressed clearly into each of its snowy, menacing landscapes. This game, based on the bleak, post-apocalyptic novels of the Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, comes from a team clearly familiar with the texture of post-nuclear disaster: the blackened berries withering on the bushes, the homeless dogs, nature’s relentless reclamation of all human edifice. The effects of this fictional nuclear holocaust have surely been exaggerated for video game effect – the swamp sharks and mutant horses, to name but two – but there’s a melancholy near to the surface of this brittle shooter that has the quality of lived experience. Continue reading...

Built for the rough, the hugely intimidating new G-Wagon is actually a bit of a smoothieMercedes-Benz G-Class

Social network targeted legislators around the world, promising or threatening to withhold investmentFacebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of how Facebook: Continue reading...

Retail giant plans to open its first store in Los Angeles as early as the end of the year, according to a Wall Street Journal reportAmazon plans to open dozens of grocery stores across the United States as it looks to expand in the food business, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.Related: Return order: New York leaders plead with Bezos to reconsider Amazon deal Continue reading...

Charities say parental guidance about scary-doll challenges may have worsened issue

Children’s charities say warnings about online suicide challenge have done more harm than goodBritain’s media, schools and police forces were told on Thursday to stop promoting an online hoax about the so-called Momo challenge, amid fears that unjustified warnings about the supposed phenomenon risked doing more harm than good.The Momo challenge centres on false claims that a mysterious character is using WhatsApp messages to encourage children to kill themselves. After it moved from the fringes of the internet to the mass media, interventions from authority figures were blamed for creating a full-blown moral panic – and genuine fear among children. Continue reading...

Features such as loot boxes need tighter regulation, says deputy Labour leaderGambling-style features in computer games, which encourage players to pay for items such as loot boxes that may be worth very little, warrant stricter oversight by the Gambling Commission to prevent them becoming a “gateway” to betting addiction, Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, said.Speaking as he proposed much tighter controls on online gambling, including caps on the amount that consumers can gamble, Watson said not enough was being done to deal with gambling through games. Continue reading...

Organisation to give support to and encourage greater representation of people of colour in UK game developmentA group of games industry insiders has launched a new initiative to tackle the problem of poor diversity in the UK video game development sector.POC in Play is described by the group as a racial equity and inclusion movement with an aim to improve representation and to provide events and initiatives for people of colour either working in the industry or thinking of joining. Continue reading...

App to set up ‘age-appropiate’ rules for under-13s to comply with US data protection lawsTikTok, the popular video-sharing app formerly known as Musical.ly, has agreed to a record $5.7m (£4.2m) fine with the US Federal Trade Commission after being accused of illegally collecting personal information from children under 13.The app, which is owned by the Chinese giant Bytedance, a private startup with a $75bn valuation, admitted to improper data collection in a statement following the settlement and said that it would begin keeping younger users in “age-appropriate TikTok environments”, where those under 13 would be pushed into a more passive role, able to watch videos, but not post or comment on the platform. Continue reading...

Radical map changes and fun pirate-themed skins give a fresh look to counter strong competition from Apex LegendsThe latest season of Fortnite is now live, introducing a major new volcano area, as well as a host of pirate-themed locations and features.Season 8 kicked off early on Thursday morning with the arrival of a gigantic volcano in the north east of the island, spewing lava along various large channels. This fiery liquid dishes out damage to players who step in it (and makes them bounce), providing a new environmental hazard. Continue reading...

Charities are reaping the benefits of these modern-day telethons as video game players fundraise live on the internetThere has been a quiet revolution in the world of philanthropy over recent years, driven by the fact that sitting down to play a video game until you fall over from sleep deprivation can raise thousands or even millions of dollars for charity – as long as you do it live on the internet.“The impact is big and getting bigger,” says Jeremy Wells, fundraising events manager for Médecins Sans Frontières, a popular partner for charity streams. “Summer Games Done Quick is our biggest fundraiser of the year – it brought in $2.1m last year out of $4.7m for our whole events program.” Continue reading...

PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch; RedLynx/Ubisoft Kiev

Robin wants to find a way to create a site that doesn’t require coding experienceAs chair of our local allotment association, I’m wondering about setting up a website to provide information and news to new and existing allotmenteers. Can this be done with basic tech knowledge and zero experience of web design or coding? There’s a bewildering number of services offering to host websites, sell domain names, provide easy-to-use templates and so on at a range of prices. What are the catches with the free or cheap services on offer?We have a Facebook group but nobody in the association is very keen to keep this active. RobinIt’s a pity you don’t like the idea of using Facebook because this is generally the quickest and easiest way for a small group to get online. In fact, if an organisation has a physical manifestation – a school, park or church, allotments, a restaurant or so on – then it may already have a Facebook page. If so, you can apply to take it over. If that fails, you can start your own page and compete with it. Continue reading...

From the ‘one-size-fits-men’ approach to smartphone design to the medical trials that are putting women’s lives at risk … this book uses data like a laserThe problem with feminism is that it’s just too familiar. The attention of a jaded public and neophiliac media may have been aroused by #MeToo, with its connotations of youth, sex and celebrity, but for the most part it has drifted recently towards other forms of prejudice, such as transphobia. Unfortunately for women, though, the hoary old problems of discrimination, violence and unpaid labour are still very much with us. We mistake our fatigue about feminism for the exhaustion of patriarchy. A recent large survey revealed that more than two thirds of men in Britain believe that women now enjoy equal opportunities. When the writer and activist Caroline Criado Perez campaigned to have a female historical figure on the back of sterling banknotes, one man responded: “But women are everywhere now!”It’s a smart strategy, therefore, to invite readers to view this timeworn topic through the revealing lens of data, bringing to light the hidden places where inequality still resides. Criado Perez has assembled a cornucopia of statistics – from how blind auditions have increased the proportion of female players hired by orchestras to nearly 50%, to the good reasons why women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. This is a man’s world, we learn, because those who built it didn’t take gender differences into account. Most offices, we learn, are five degrees too cold for women, because the formula to determine their temperature was developed in the 1960s based on the metabolic resting rate of a 40-year-old, 70kg man; women’s metabolisms are slower. Women in Britain are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack: heart failure trials generally use male participants. Cars are designed around the body of “Reference Man”, so although men are more likely to crash, women involved in collisions are nearly 50% more likely to be seriously hurt. Continue reading...

Medical experts who counter misinformation are weathering coordinated attacks. Now some are fighting back

Groups say no evidence yet of self-harm from craze, but resulting hysteria poses a riskIt is the most talked about viral scare story of the year so far, blamed for child suicides and violent attacks – but experts and charities have warned that the “Momo challenge” is nothing but a “moral panic” spread by adults.Warnings about the supposed Momo challenge suggest that children are being encouraged to kill themselves or commit violent acts after receiving messages on messaging service WhatsApp from users with a profile picture of a distorted image of woman with bulging eyes. Continue reading...

Commissioners demand hard numbers from firm ahead of European parliament electionsFacebook has repeatedly withheld key data on its alleged efforts to clamp down on disinformation ahead of the European elections, the EU’s executive has said.Related: Anti-vaxx propaganda has gone viral on Facebook. Pinterest has a cure Continue reading...

Set in a new region, Galar, the new Pokémon games for Switch will be released later this yearNintendo has unveiled two new Pokémon games for its Switch console: Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. Introduced in a short online broadcast by Junichi Masuda and Shigeru Ohmori at Pokémon’s developer, Game Freak, they feature a painterly, impressionistic world that juxtaposes urban and natural environments, continuing the series’ long-running theme of human interaction with nature.The region of Gallar is clearly Britain-inspired; it’s all little ivy-coloured cottages in the villages and austere London-style buildings in the cities. The setting has already prompted a slew of creative nicknames from fans on Twitter, among them Pokémon Greggs/Pokémon Nandos. Continue reading...

Mentions of game including hidden message comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie-the-Pooh also scrubbed from social media site WeiboTaiwanese horror game Devotion has been removed from sale globally, following a backlash after a hidden message referencing Chinese president Xi Jinping and Winnie-the-Pooh was discovered in-game.Devotion, by the Taiwanese indie developer Red Candle Games, was released on 19 February and was initially popular among horror enthusiasts. However, the discovery of a number of hidden jokes – allegedly critical of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – has ignited a firestorm of online criticism. Continue reading...

‘China’s Apple’ finally lands in the UK with cut-price top-spec phone with a slide-out selfie cameraAfter several years of threatening Xiaomi has finally entered the UK with a series of good-value smartphones starting from £99 including the range-topping Mi Mix 3. But has “China’s Apple” delivered something new, or just another forgettable Chinese smartphone?At first glance the £499 Mi Mix 3 looks fairly boring. The front has a giant display, just like the rest. The back appears shiny glass, just like the rest. It’s got polished metal sides, just like most. But pick up the phone and you realise it’s hiding more than one secret. Continue reading...

Our hard drives are full of all kinds of clutter, but you can’t hold those files in your hands to see if they spark joyLeaving a long-term relationship, you find yourself standing on the precipice of a life yet unlived; all of a sudden the accumulated trinkets and tchotchkes of​ your life together exist only to mock you in your unspoken grief. There’s no better time to get into getting rid of stuff.After she emptied our house of all ​that she wanted, I emptied it a second time, of everything that we had grown to want together. I embraced the spartan wisdom of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – the self-help manual de rigueur for people who want to want less. Like a barren arctic island basking in my daily hour of sunlight, I proudly embraced an aesthetic of Scandinavian noir-chic, telling anyone within earshot that the drab palette and multiple timber-veneer Arkelstorp side tables were the trappings of a new and more mature me, a me that was as comfortable owning six oversized beige floor lamps and playing at underwear origami as I was being alone. Continue reading...

SEC asks judge to act after car boss allegedly breached deal to pre-approve his messagesThe US financial regulator has asked a judge to hold Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, in contempt of court for tweeting misleading information in breach of a deal that saw him fined $20m (£15.2m) for inaccurate tweets last year.The Securities and Exchange Commission said Musk had “once again published inaccurate and material information about Tesla to his over 24 million Twitter followers”, according to court papers filed on Monday night. Continue reading...

From Pokémon Snap to Fatal Frame, photography has long been popular in games – but some developers are taking the idea furtherPeople love to take pictures in video games. As the game worlds we explore have become more beautiful, players have become more interested in photographing them and sharing the results. It is almost standard for open-world games in particular to include photo modes, which allow players to mimic real-world photographers by adjusting the framing, brightness and exposure. Selfie modes, meanwhile, let you add filters and change characters’ facial expressions, from Link in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2. There is even an augmented-reality photo mode in Pokémon Go, which lets players take posed photos of digital Pokémon in the real world.Some games take it a step further, incorporating photography as an interaction within the game. One of the earliest examples is Gekibo: Gekisha Boy, a 1992 Japanese game that almost made it to Europe a decade later as Polaroid Pete, before its release was cancelled. It plays like a side-scrolling shooter but with a camera for a gun. The cartoonish subjects users can photograph include extraterrestrials, racist caricatures and women in various states of undress. Continue reading...

Device has eight-inch flexible screen that folds all the way round the outside of the phoneThe Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has followed Samsung’s lead by unveiling a super-luxury 5G phone with a folding screen called the Mate X with a price tag of €2,299 (£1,995).Introduced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday, the Mate X has a flexible OLED display that covers both the front and back of the device, and which unfolds outwards to become an eight-inch (20cm) tablet screen. Continue reading...

As digital billboards record customers’ reactions to advertisements tailored to them, just who is safeguarding Australians’ privacy?